The discussion around the decline of funding for the humanities was supported by a number of sources including: “The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation,” a 2013 bipartisan report put out by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future,” a study by Harvard University from 2013; and “Humanities Indicators: A Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” last updated in October 2016.
I used the Business Insider article “30 People with ‘Soft’ College Majors Who Became Extremely Successful” from December 2012 to compile the list of leaders in finance, media, or policy with background in the humanities.
The Alice Munro quote—“It’s as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.”—is from her story “Friend of My Youth,” published in the New Yorker in 1990.
Nicole Pollentier’s quotes are taken from several of our conversations in 2015 and 2016. The stanza from her poem “building pathways in the neuroplastic city” is included with her permission.
The Story of the Three Traders: I pulled these narratives together from my conversations with Robert Johnson, Chris Canavan, and a handful of other traders who worked with George Soros at the Soros Fund. I also used quotes and ideas from George Soros’s 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance, as well as reporting from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Sebastian Mallaby’s excellent 2010 book about hedge funds, More Money Than God, was an invaluable resource for some of the market details regarding “Black Wednesday” and “Black Monday.”
Husserl, Heidegger, and the Story of the Apricot Cocktail: Simone de Beauvoir describes this story in her 1962 memoir The Prime of Life. There is also a description of this encounter—as well as of Husserl’s “phenomenological kindergarten” classes—in Sarah Bakewell’s fascinating 2016 book At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails.
I took inspiration from Steven Watts’s The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (2005) for the descriptions of Henry Ford’s early days as an inventor and engineer at the opening of the chapter.
Robert I. Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company (2001), and Chris Baréz-Brown’s How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas: Shake Up Your Business, Shake Up Your Life (2008), are just two of countless examples of this type of “creative discourse” in business today.
The quotes from Saras D. Sarasvathy and Ben Baldwin are taken from a 2013 Wall Street Journal article entitled “How Entrepreneurs Come Up with Great Ideas.”
The Mark Fields quote is from one of our conversations in 2015.
The Agatha Christie quote is from her 1977 autobiography: Agatha Christie.
George Soros’s quote is from his book The Alchemy of Finance (1987).
The Tina Landau quote describing Phylicia Rashad is taken from the 2016 New York Times article: “Phylicia Rashad, Finding Joy in Tribulations of Her Role in ‘Head of Passes.’”
Graham Green’s The End of the Affair was published in 1951 and George Saunders’s essay “The Braindead Megaphone” was published in 2007.
The Buddhist priest Zenkei Blanche Hartman’s 2001 lecture on “Beginner’s Mind” is available on the Chapel Hill Zen Center Website: www.chzc.org/hartman4.htm. Last accessed on November 8, 2016.
The story of Bjarke Ingels and his quotes are taken from several of our conversations in 2015 and 2016.
I spent time with Sheila Heen, Margrethe Vestager, Chris Voss, and Cathy Corison in 2015 and 2016 and I used our conversations and reporting on their work to create these profiles of sensemaking at its most masterful.
These quotes from Hubert Dreyfus are taken from an interview I did with him at his office at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2012.